[UPDATE] In Development – Unity Splash screen tools – in beta!

Delivering on the promise we made when we announced our new products and pricing in June, we’re excited to announce that the new Unity splash screen is available in today’s beta release (5.5.0b3).

We have made several changes thanks to the many people who gave feedback during the last preview. The new system allows you to easily add multiple logos such as own company, publisher and game logos as a splash screen shown when your project is launched. Take a look at the video below to see this feature in action:

We’re really excited and can’t wait to see what your splash screens look like. So what does this mean for you when using Unity 5.5?

Plus and Pro subscribers

You will have the choice to:

Use the new tools, include the Made with Unity co-branding

Use the new tools, and remove the Made with Unity co-branding

Remove the splash screen and roll your own solution.

Personal Edition Users

You’ll have the same splash screen tools as everyone else, but we’ll include the Made With Unity co-branding, positioned either below, or sequentially with your branding design.

For all Unity users, the new splash screen tools now feature a range of easy to configure options: You can choose whether to display a dark or light Made with Unity branding and your company logo on sequential screens or combined on a single screen, and whether to use an image or a solid colour as a background. You also have the option to show several logos on sequential screens, for instance a publisher logo followed by a developer logo. And lastly, you can choose between a static logo or a dolly animation, or opt to define the custom parameters of the logo animation using the Logo Duration, Logo Zoom, and Background Zoom properties.

Beta 3 Splash Screen Known Issues & Upcoming changes

We wanted to get the splash screen out early so we can get feedback which means

there is still some work to do during the beta period and a few unresolved issues.

We still need to add an API so the splash screen can be configured from script.

WebGL: We have some upcoming changes that will show a simplified version of the splash screen immediately and then blend to the new one.

STV: There is an issue when drawing the splash screen on Samsung TV, we are working on this and will have a fix before the end of the beta period.

VR: The VR splash screen is a placeholder, we have plans to add support for a 3D version during the beta period.

Give us your feedback in the comments below! What do you want from this feature next?

76 Comentarios

The previous personal edition logo looked very amateurish. It’s great to see you’ve listened to user feedback and made it look like something to be proud of rather than want to hide. I like the co-branding screen too. Well done.

Are you guys finally fixing the hard-coded OSX «About» page as part of this?

The About Us page for UNITY_STANDALONG_OSX builds lists copyright dates for Unity’s stuff that is years out of date, there is no way for unity devs to make any mention of their own copyright info, and no way to customize any of that material which is present in every OSX app built with Unity.

For years I worked on different projects with different engine.
Unity is very different.
Unity gives a great opportunity to developers.
Projects with Unity:
Learning Unity is the speed of light
Unity projects are fast.
Unity in support of the miracle.

I am working years with Unity.
Migration to other engine is impossible.
Because Unity is available here.
You download the Unity
Enjoy this engine.

Came here to suggest this as well. I’d like to see the range go from -1 to +1, so that I could do something like make the background image scale from (for example) 150% to 100% while the splash screen plays out, and then seamlessly transition from the splash screen to the opening/title screen.

I tried on a Acer Iconia Tab 8 and with the default display of 2 seconds it didn’t show on the splash when the game started at all so I’ve since increased that time to 5 seconds and it still doesn’t work although there is a brightened screen flash for about 1 second before the game loads that is probably the splash screen attempting to load.

The Acer Iconia Tab 8 has an Intel Atom CPU and an Intel HD Graphics GPU if that helps.

OK, so it’s not some sort of weird Intel Atom bug because it works fine with a blank project.

My project really isn’t a project but a cumulative asset library I use as a hobby to dawdle around with. That being the case it’s huge and most of what is imported won’t be compiled into the APK that is causing the problem I reported.

I think the easiest way to reproduce this bug for you is to:

1. Unity 5.5.0 Beta 3
2. Opsive Behavior Designer
3. Opsive Movement/Tactical/Formations Pack
4. Opsive 3rd Person Controller
5. Opsive Death Match
6. Configure Splash Screen to use one (but it will probably still not work with only Made with Unity)
7. Compile with Mono2x for Acer Iconia Tab 8

The APK will be about 147 MB loaded in Android 4.4.2.

Whether it works or not for you will depend I’m guessing will depend on available RAM, although the Acer Iconia Tab 8 is not a slouch in RAM but it also has FHD screen. The game actually loads and plays.

Also, before I forget – you’ll need to edit the includes of a couple of source code files to include the UnityEngine.AI because of some NavMesh Agent business…

update:

So now…I made some mods to how the Splash Screen & game as described above are compiled and it almost works:

Great work on the splash, however as someone mentioned about terrains, when can we see decent video support for mobile and VR, especially VR 360 video mono and stereo as well streaming. Because without an assetstore purchase this is impossible. But I feel those assets still can’t be really optimized as when it’s integrated. When do we see the videotexture feature being improved or replaced? VR is screaming for good video support in unity for 2 years already. Mentioned it so many times on conferences, forums and news item, nobody talked about it yet. Is it a secret thing or never coming?

It would be great if we could show a progress bar with the same splash screen. Right now, it’s actually really difficult to show a progress bar with the same image dimensions after the splash screen is loaded. It’s exactly what subway surfers does.

I am loving what’s been added so far, but just wanted to ask for a feature to be added to it.

Like I have asked in the comment on the YouTube Video, any chance for support for the Splash Screen to support a cut down version of a Scene.

So we could have stuff happening in the background while it pops up the logos and the «Mad in Unity» logo.

Think of a space game where the splash screen would start up with ships and Freighters docking with a space station etc. then have the logos popup ending with the words «Made in Unity» then fade to the main scene of the game where the menu scrolls into the view.

This giving a seamless scene from the splash screen to the game menu scene.

I am not asking for a massive scene to be supported, but a cut down version.

I think it would be great to be able to have it randomly select different configurations of the main loading screen. Would that be possible to include? Like for personal users be able to have it randomly decide each load to use one of three different load screen configurations? I.E One blue background load screen, one green one, and a red one. This way I could integrate it with the rest of the loading screens for my game.

Like select a random configuration each time? That’s probably quite a specific thing to your game here. Not sure it’s something that would fit with most others. We do have a scripting API so it may be possible to support this via that. I’ll keep it in mind.

Other question: Ive been waiting so long for updates on the terrain designing. For example making «holes» (by that i mean removing polygons of the terrain) this would make it for example easyer to make caves or deep wells without having to just «dig» a hole and then weirdly place stuff around the well, so you couldnt see that u made a hole into the terrain. (dont know if that made sense sry, englisch isnt my native) im aware that those things are already possible now but its alot of work and tweaking for getting around it etc. Or the detail mesh placement is something i cant work with tbh. there should be a easyer way of placing many rocks (with LOD support) etc. i just feel like, its such a easy and great engine (and dont get me wrong im so in love with it and ill never use anything else) but the terrain designing really came to short. Oh and another big thing im missing since long time is, that there is no (free and really good) way of placing for example grass and trees on NON terrain meshes. (like that i could make my terrains in blender and add a little more detail and flexibility to it) and then even have a quick way of placing grass with wind support. And imagine you could paint textures on non unity terrains :)

again sorry for the bad english (and for writing half a book), id love to get a answer to this and keep up the good work
Ilias

Excellent work. Looking forward to using this. I think having an option for individual logos to be skip-able would be good. So instead of skipping all logos, only the ones we choose can be skipped. Obviously for those on the Free version, you’d have the Unity logo fixed as unskipable.

Would be nice to have. Just let it be unskipable, until the engine is done loading, and then let it be skipable. On computers, players will be spamming the space, esc, mouse or enter key to get past these startup things and on mobile they will be tapping the screen like crazy to get past them, so it would be nice to have them be skipable. And if the API you are talking about in the OP is on runtime, we could configure it to be unskipable the first time the game loads and then skipable when starting up the next time.

For absolutely every “feature” you concoct (sorry if wrong wording) you can use the same justification: someone in the world wants exactly this “feature”! We got people feedback! We are listening to their demands! Universal excuse ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I’m sorry but did you see the absolute shitstorm that erupted on the internet when Unity announced the current licencing scheme? This development is directly addressing the outcomes of that. It became clear that there was a negative association between the presentation of the Unity logo and the quality of the games, due in part to the large numbers of sub-par games created using the free version. Customisation is meant to help alleviate these problems.

Being a developer working for a studio with a Pro licence I am not even interested in this but it would be foolish to claim this is a feature no-one asked for. People wanted the logo gone, which did happen for the paid options. Unity is not going to remove the logo from the free licence and would still very much like bigger studios to advertise their engine. The latter would just not happen without customisation of how it fits into the overall marketing of games.

> did you see the absolute shitstorm that erupted on the internet when Unity announced the current licencing scheme?

Yes, I did. Exactly, the thing is: this “feature” responses factitious, unnatural demand. Forced by vendor. At first they made people want to solve this artificial issue, and then provide solution like “people wanted the logo gone” and here we are to the rescue! More over, this appears not just in release notes listed somewhere in the middle, but the whole sensational blog post is devoted to this “long-awaited feature”! Ridiculous.

Me and a couple of others got together and tried to improve something to help the community and the personal users, that’s it really. This is not some large orchestrated marketing campaign but just a few developers who thought people may be interested. If you look through the previous blog posts you can see developers write about what they are up to all the time. I’m sorry if this article upset you.

Even if I had pro, I would’ve been more than happy to show it was made possible with Unity by doing some splash screen like this.
But now these tools make it easier for all users, all while enhancing Unity’s presence to the world. :D

I’ll do my best to release something Unity can be proud to be associated with. I think there are many other indie developers out there who wish the same.

So cool, but it would be great if you could add objects or layers, also animations, although I think the next thing will be small sound files that are played during the entire presentation or for each splash screen, I think it might be more interesting

Thank for you job. This is great work! i been see on this tool. But may be your team not be delete config this tool from script in future (if posible of course) because his is very good for simple additional splash screen configuration path?

Is there a possibility to have script code running while the splash screen is shown? And cancel the splash screen that way?

Use case:
* I generally want the player to cancel the logo video^W splash screen.
* There are exceptions though, like during first run if I need the time to finish copying the first level to HDD — this requires custom logic
* Which key/button/… is used depends on input devices, platform, and sometimes build parameters, so I also need non-trivial logic deciding that

We have a scripting API that lets you draw the splash screen in a scene so it’s possible to do it this way. You would however need to turn the splash screen off(requires plus/pro licence) and then draw it in the scene using SplashScreen.Draw.

We have investigated this. The problem is that for a good animated logo you would need a lot of frames and a large texture so it bloats the build. We decided to hold off and wait till the new video system was ready to see if this would be a better alternative. New video is planned for 5.5 so once it’s ready I’ll take a look at if it can work with the splash screen.﻿